Last day of summer holidays.

I can't believe we are already at the end of summer holidays. Now my holidays start! Please check the September Newsletter for dates that I will be away. There are a lot of them this month.
I am so glad that it warmed up for our last week of summer holidays. We had a lot of fun in the pools the last two days. Today, Grace is bringing a special art activity for the children. We will also be making butter. We will put cream in a jar and shake and shake and shake! Then we will try our butter on some homemade banana muffins as our afternoon snack!
 We will be saying goodbye to Grace and Wyatt today. (This has always been my least favourite part of my job.) I know Grace will be back next summer, and most of us will see Wyatt at school!
Enjoy your last few days. I know I will! See most of you on Tuesday for the first day of school!

Homemade Ice Cream

On Monday, Grace's family made ice cream for us in their ice cream maker. They put an ice cream custard in the container with ice and salt in the outer container and stirred and stirred and stirred...

I found a recipe for chocolate ice cream that was a little different. First I asked the children how they thought we could make ice cream. Lillian  thought we could put chocolate in the freezer and maybe marshmallows. So we tried that! Tori thought they would just get hard. We tried our frozen chocolate chip and mini marshmallow. They were NOT ice cream, but we were surprised that the marshmallow was still soft!

For our ice cream, we took turns beating cream until stiff peaks formed. I tried to let everyone have equal turns and Lillian was last, and I had to cut her turn short because we were starting to make butter. We stopped in time! Then we mixed it with chocolate and put it in the freezer for the day.  It was delicious!

 Next week we're going to make butter and maybe some kind of biscuits.

If you are interested, here is the recipe we used
1 can sweetened condensed milk
2/3 cup chocolate syrup
2 cups heavy cream

Line a 9x5 loaf pan with aluminum foil. In a large bowl, stir together condensed milk and chocolate syrup until colour is even. In a seperate bowl, whip cream until stiff peaks form. Fold cream into chocolate mixture and pour all into prepared pan. Cover and freeze 6 hours, until firm.

BBQ at Grace's!

A great big thank you to Grace and family for inviting us! We had a wonderful time!

We got to see Molly and Olivia's lambs. AJ had fun chasing them around and dumped their water pail! Eddie wasn't so sure about them at first, but then grabbed onto one and began laughing! So cute! Anthony Lillian and Tori all made sure to touch each lamb, there were 4 of them!  Then we went to the calf barn. The older children went with Olivia to see the bigger calves and the younger ones tried to make music with the head gates for the calves. They really rattled!
Then we checked out the combine and tractors. The horn in the combine works great!

We played the rest of the afternoon on the swing set, in the sandbox and in the play house. It was so much fun! Tori, Lillian and Anthony were brave enough to get into the pool. Anthony is a fish and was hard to get out, but the girls just took a quick dip!!!
We had an amazing BBQ lunch (thanks again Reid family!). We had hamburgs, hot dogs, sandwiches, veggies, fruit, cheese, and cheeses! Then we got to watch (and play while we waited for) homemade ice cream to be made! It was delicious, and we got to put toppings on it if we wanted!
Then the babies had a quick nap in the stroller and Anthony had a swim. Tori and Lillian both put their swim suits back on, but when they got to the pool they changed their minds and didn't go into the pool!
Then walked back for snack and a quick play before pick up time!

Feild Trip to School!

What an amazing day we had! Grace's sister Molly is babysitting one of my neighbours so the two of them came with us! Oden's mom and sister, Freya, came too. Our two old friends who live right next to the school came over to play too! That made for lots of playing!!!
What a cold summer day. Thanks to all the parents for dressing your children warmly.
I brought hot chocolate for us on our picnic. We all enjoyed our lunch and just as we were finishing, there was a little rain shower that got us wet. Before that we climbed and slid and played catch and played in the sand. We walked around the school to play on the old climber and show Tori where her classroom will be, and around the front, Grace lifted everyone up to peek in Lillian's new classroom. When it was time to head home, Edison fell asleep in the stroller before we started walking and AJ fell asleep shortly after. When we got back to daycare, we watched the movie Frozen. Thanks to Grace for bringing it! I think everyone had a good time! I did! I will try to get the pictures on the blog this weekend!

What a week!!!

We have been doing so many fun things that I haven't had a chance to write about them. On Monday we played in the little pools, baked lemon bread AND date squares! We also brought the easel outside to colour! Yesterday was a rainy day, so we washed and changed the toys a couple of days early, but we were still a little stir crazy. We decided to play follow the leader with umbrellas outside. It was lots of fun!
Today, Grace's sister Olivia came to play and she brought some of her books to read to us. We did more baking and played go fish. We made a big fort, but Holly our cat, liked it more than we did. AND we planned a trip to the school tomorrow morning for a picnic! I hope the showers hold off!!

Math

We have been busy working on math today. We have been sorting and patterning. We have practiced printing some numbers and counted in English and French. We are about to do some more counting with beads.
We played hard this morning (or the weekend is catching up with us) everyone needed a little rest this afternoon!

Quick update

We had a busy but fun end of the week last week, and now we are starting our short week. I would like to thank all of the parents for your compassion about my grandpa's death. I really appreciate it.
We had a busy morning - lots of swinging today. The new markers were a hit, even the babies got new markers and not one went into a mouth!!!
The children are really enjoying the journal-workbook routine at nap time. They don't show a lot of interest in the movies (makes it harder to get dishes done and snack prepared, but I'm really not disappointed about that!) I got the geo boards out, so they are busy with elastics and learning about shapes. Also still mastering ELECT skill 5.3 fine motor skills. Bronwynn is now making patterns with her elastics little, big little big.  Shhhh, don't tell them their learning about math right now !